Fellows 2015/2016
Professor Sebastian Conrad
Free University Berlin, Germany
Coolie Labour in the German Empire
sebastian.conrad(at)fu-berlin.de
Sebastian Conrad is professor of history at Freie Universität, Berlin. He is a member of the directorate of the Forum Transregionale Studien. He joined the university’s Department of History and Cultural Studies in 2010 after having taught for several years at the European University Institute in Florence. He was a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin, and a visiting professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. His current main interest is trans-national and global history approaches and their contribution to an understanding of the interactions and entanglements of the past. He has a background in both modern Western European and Japanese history, and has worked extensively on issues of colonialism, post-colonialism, trans-nationalism, intellectual history, memory and historiography.
At re:work, Sebastian Conrad is working on ‘Coolie’ labour in the German Empire. As a solution to the labour problem, German colonial officials, both in East Africa and in the Pacific region, opted for the recruitment of Chinese workers. This was part of a much larger transformation in the labour recruitment of plantation labour after the end of slavery, and under the conditions of capitalist colonial exploitation. Sebastian Conrad is also exploring the social and cultural history of this process, and is particularly interested in the comparative and global dimensions of the issue.
Publications
What Is Global History? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016.
with Jürgen Osterhammel, eds. 1750-1870. Wege zur modernen Welt. Vol. 4. 6 vols. Geschichte der Welt. Munich: C.H. Beck, 2016.
‘The Dialectics of Remembrance. Memories of Empire in Cold War Japan’. Comparative Studies in Society and History 56, no. 1 (2014): 4–33.
‘Enlightenment in Global History. A Historiographical Critique’. The American Historical Review 117, no. 4 (2012): 999–1027.
with Shalini Randeria, eds. Jenseits des Eurozentrismus. Postkoloniale Perspektiven in den Geschichts- und Kulturwissenschaften. 2., erweiterte Auflage. Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2012.
German Colonialism. A Short History. Translated by Sorcha O’Hagan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
‘Japanese Historical Writing’. In The Oxford History of Historical Writing. Historical Writing since 1945, edited by Axel Schneider, and Daniel Woolf, vol. 5: 637–58. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Globalisation and the Nation in Imperial Germany. Translated by Sorcha O’Hagan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
The Quest for the Lost Nation. Writing History in Germany and Japan in the American Century. Translated by Alan Nothnagle. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010.
‘Work, Max Weber, Confucianism. The Confucian Ethic and Spirit of Japanese Capitalism’. In Work in a Modern Society. The German Historical Experience in Comparative Perspective, edited by Jürgen Kocka, 153–68. New York, NY: Berghahn, 2010.
with Dominic Sachsenmaier, eds. Competing Visions of World Order. Global Moments and Movements, 1880s-1930s. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Last updated: August 01, 2016
Professor Cláudio Costa Pinheiro
Universidade do Rio de Janeiro, Brasilien
Global History of Slavery
Cláudio Pinheirowas born on the bright, sunny side of the world in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He holds a PhD in social anthropology (2004) from Rio de Janeiro Federal University. Pinheiro is associate professor at the Institute of History of the same university and chairs the Sephis Programme (South-South Exchange Programme for Research on the History of Development).
Pinheiro deals with the interfaces between history, anthropology and sociology. His research interests include colonialism and its durable effects, particularly concerning knowledge production and circulation, and the politics of language and epistemology regarding the institutionalization of power, as well as comparisons between Asia (particularly India) and Latin America.
His research project at re:work focus on colonialism and the politics of classification and slavery in modern times. It is based on an investigation of the institutionalization of a very sophisticated system of classifying and organising discovered worlds by European colonialism in parts of Asia and South America. Through this process, he argues, a wide variety of forms of labour, social hierarchies, forms of life and social organization came to be subsumed under a very narrow set of concepts ultimately referring to the western concept and experience of slavery. Like other fundamental concepts and institutions belonging to the European political sphere, slavery was made universal through the colonization of epistemic territories and was carried out as imperial expansion that codified other worlds in forms that were mediated by the Western historical experience.
Publications
Os Estudos Subalternos. Leituras de Gramsci na Índia e a globalização da historiografia indiana, ed. Rio de Janeiro: Fundação Getúlio Vargas, forthcoming.
‘Las muchas encarnaciones de Tagore y los escritos de su espíritu’. In SUR / SOUTH. Poetics and Politics of Thinking Latin America – India, edited by Susanne Klengel and Alexandra Ortiz Wallner, translated by Eloísa Martín, 45–70. Frankfurt: Vervuert, 2016.
with Bernardo Buarque de Hollanda, and João Marcelo Ehlert Maia, eds. Práticas e textualidades. Pensando a pesquisa e a publicação em ciências sociais. Rio de Janeiro: Fundação Getúlio Vargas, 2015.
with João Marcelo Ehlert Maia, Bernardo Buarque de Hollanda, and Helena Bomeny, eds. Ideias em perspectiva global. Rio de Janeiro: Fundação Getúlio Vargas, 2014.
‘BRICS nas Ciências Sociais – Para que serve? Modernidade, Desenvolvimento e suas Geografias Imaginárias’. In Desafios sociais, políticos e culturais dos BRICS, edited by Gustavo Lins Ribeiro, 175–202. São Paulo: ANPOCS, 2014.
‘Blurred Boundaries. Slavery, Unfree Labour and the Subsumption of Multiple Social and Labor Identities in India’. In Labour Matters. Towards Global Histories. Studies in Honour of Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, edited by Marcel van der Linden and Prabhu P. Mohapatra, 172–94. New Dehli: Tulika Books, 2009.
‘Words of Conquest. Portuguese Colonial Experiences and the Conquest of Epistemological Territories’. Indian Historical Review 36, no. 1 (2009): 37–53.
Last updated: February 22, 2016
Dr. Neda Deneva
Център за либерални стратегии (Centre for Liberal Strategies), Sofia, Bulgaria
Irregular Workers, Irregular Citizens. The Changing Meanings and Practices of Work among Bulgarian Roma in the Context of EU Labour Mobility
is a research fellow at the Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia, Bulgaria. She holds a PhD in sociology and social anthropology from Central European University. Her dissertation is an ethnography of Bulgarian Muslims’ migration to Spain that explores the reconfigurations of citizenship by migrants’ everyday claims and struggles within the EU. Her main research interests include transnational migration, labour transformations and new work regimes, citizenship and relations with the state, care work, and minority-state relations. Her more recent work focuses on Roma migration in the EU and the implications of the changing meanings and realities of work on access to citizenship rights, and changing generational and care relations. She has also conducted research into policy-oriented issues related to third country nationals’ and refugees’ access to integrational measures, the labour market, and health care in Bulgaria.
Her research at re:work explores transformations of labour in the context of heightened precariousness and free labour mobility within the EU. It focuses on the specific case of Bulgarian Roma who are engaged in low-skilled, irregular labour and adopt alternative forms of making a living, such as begging and reliance on social security, either as citizens in Bulgaria, or as migrants to Germany and the Netherlands. The project traces how Roma have been positioned and constructed as members of the working class, ethnically different, and as dangerous or surplus and partial citizens in the period stretching from late socialism to current EU labour and citizenship regimes. The project seeks to develop an understanding of how new forms of dispossession, disempowerment, and difference are produced and sustained. Drawing on historical data, policy analysis and ethnographic research, the project analyses the intimate links between labour relations and meanings of citizenship by examining how different types of work (regular, irregular, productive and reproductive) condition the different forms of everyday access to citizenship entitlements and categories that are accessible to citizens and migrants. By situating the research in the context of EU free labour mobility, the aim is to critically appraise the heterogeneous nature of EU citizenship and the production of new hierarchies and inequalities among EU citizens triggered by the new realities of labour.
Publications
‘Flexible Kin-Work, Flexible Migration. Aging Migrants Caught between Productive and Reproductive Labour in the European Union’. In Transnational Aging and Kin-Work, edited by Parin Dossa and Cati Coe. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, forthcoming.
‘Conflicting Meanings and Practices of Work. Bulgarian Roma as Citizens and Migrants’. In Situating Migration in Transition. Temporal, Structural, and Conceptual Transformations of Migrations. Sketches from Bulgaria, by Raia Apostolova, Neda Deneva, and Tsvetelina Hristova, 42–70. Sofia: Collective for Social Interventions, 2014.
with Tsvetelina Hristova, Raia Apostolova, and Mathias Fiedler. ‘Trapped in Europe’s Quagmire. The Situation of Asylum Seekers and Refugees in Bulgaria’. München: bordermonitoring.eu, July 2014.
with Dumitrita Holdis. ‘Access to Employment for Beneficiaries of International Protection in Bulgaria, Poland, Romania and Slovakia, Bulgaria Country Report and Cross-Country Analysis’. Geneva: United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Regional Representation for Central Europe, 2013.
‘Transnational Aging Carers. On Transformation of Kinship and Citizenship in the Context of Migration among Bulgarian Muslims in Spain’. Social Politics 19, no. 1 (2012): 105–28.
Last updated: February 22, 2016
Professor Christopher Gerteis
University of London, UK
Blue‐Collar Youth and Radical Politics in Postwar Japan
christopher.gerteis(at)soas.ac.uk
Dr Christopher Gerteis specializes in the social and cultural history of Japan from 1600 to the present. Dr Gerteis received his PhD in modern Japanese history from the University of Iowa in 2001, and is currently Senior Lecturer in the History of Contemporary Japan and Chair of the Japan Research Centre at SOAS, University of London. He is founding editor of the 'SOAS Studies in Modern and Contemporary Japan', a peer-reviewed scholarly monograph series published in association with Bloomsbury (www.bloomsbury.com/soasstudies/), and co-editor of Japan Forum, the journal of the British Association for Japanese Studies.
At re:work Dr Gerteis will be working on his book Angry, Young and Mobile: Japanese Youth and the Attractions of Political Violence, which investigates the extent to which the advent of affordable airline travel influenced the radicalization of socially alienated, blue-collar youth in postwar Japan. Recent studies of men and masculinity in the Japanese workplace focus exclusively on salaried white-collar workers, while studies of the rise of the New Left have overlooked the extent to which young blue-collar men participated in the global youth culture and radical political movements that formed the core of New Left radicalism in Japan. This book examines the political culture of young working-class men during Japan’s era of rapid economic growth that characterized the 1960s and early 1970s. By focusing on the experiences of politically active, young blue-collar men, this study seeks to understand the extent to which economic class influenced the political culture of the New Left factions most responsible for the political violence that rocked Japan during the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Publications
‘The Emergence of Trade Unionism in Modern Japan’. In Routledge Handbook of Modern Japanese History, edited by Sven Saaler and Christopher Szpilman. London: Routledge, forthcoming.
with Timothy S. George. ‘Beyond the Bubble, Beyond Fukushima. Reconsidering the History of Postwar Japan’. The Asia-Pacific Journal 12, no. 8 (2014).
with Timothy S. George, eds. Japan Since 1945. From Postwar to Post-Bubble. London: Bloomsbury, 2013.
Critical Readings on the History of Industrialization in Modern Japan, vol. 1-3, ed. Leiden: Brill, 2013.
‘Political Protest in Interwar Japan - 1. Posters & Handbills from the Ohara Collection (1920s-1930s)’. In Visualizing Cultures. Image-Driven Scholarship, edited by John W. Dower and Shigeru Miyagawa. Cambridge, MA: MIT OpenCourseWare Initiative, 2011.
Gender Struggles. Wage-Earning Women and Male-Dominated Unions in Postwar Japan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.
‘The Erotic and the Vulgar. Visual Culture and Organized Labor’s Critique of U.S. Hegemony in Occupied Japan’. Critical Asian Studies 39, no. 1 (2007): 3–34.
‘Labor’s Cold Warriors. The American Federation of Labor and “Free Trade Unionism” in Cold War Japan’. Journal of American-East Asian Relations 12, no. 3 (2003): 207–24.
Last updated: February 22, 2016
Professor Peter Geschiere
Universiteit van Amsterdam, Netherlands
The Struggle over the Forest
Last updated: July 15, 2016
Professor Seth Holmes
University of California, Berkeley, USA
Training for Inequality. The Work of Care in an Era of Global Health, Gender Transition and Growing Social Inequality
Seth M. Holmes is a cultural and medical anthropologist and physician whose research interests focus on transnational immigration, work, social differences, and health as well as the ways in which social and health inequalities come to be perceived as normal and natural in society and in health care.
Holmes completed his MD and PhD in medical anthropology at UC Berkeley and San Francisco in 2007. After completing internal medicine residency at the University of Pennsylvania in 2009, he became a Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society Scholars at Columbia University and taught in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Since 2011, he has served as Martin Sisters Assistant Professor of Public Health and Medical Anthropology at UC Berkeley. He is Co-Director of the MD/PhD Track in Medical Anthropology (UCB and UCSF), Director of the Berkeley Center for Social Medicine, affiliate faculty in the Berkeley Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, and Assistant Professor of Anthropology, History and Social Medicine in the School of Medicine at UCSF.
Holmes’ research on transnational immigrant farm work and health has led to the publication of peer-reviewed articles in social science and medical journals as well as the book, Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States (UC Press, 2013). This research received multiple awards, including the Rudolf Virchow Award from the Society for Medical Anthropology, New Millennium Book Award from the Society for Medical Anthropology, the Society for the Anthropology of Work Book Award, and the Margaret Mead Award from the American Anthropological Association and the Society for Applied Anthropology. This project has been covered broadly, including by several National Public Radio and Public Radio International programs.
While in residence at re: work, Holmes will focus on understanding the ways in which medical professional students are trained explicitly and implicitly to perceive and respond to social inequalities in their work of care. In the context of today’s critical and growing domestic and global social inequalities and the decisive literature indicating the crucial roles such inequalities play in the production of health and sickness, this project seeks to elucidate the ways in which health professionals are taught to understand and respond to social inequalities – at times justifying and legitimizing, and at others challenging and confronting. This project utilizes several years of participant observation among medical trainees in North America, engaging Bourdieuian understandings of habitus, Foucauldian conceptions of subjectivation and gaze, as well as recent work on precarity and care in order to examine the processes through which clinical trainees learn to engage in the professional work of care in the midst of grave social, economic, and political inequalities.
Publications
with Heide Castañeda. ‘Representing the “European Refugee Crisis” in Germany and Beyond. Deservingness and Difference, Life and Death’. American Ethnologist 43, no. 1 (2016): 12–24.
Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies. Migrant Farmworkers in the United States. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2013.
‘Structural Vulnerability and Hierarchies of Ethnicity and Citizenship on the Farm’. Medical Anthropology 30, no. 4 (2011): 425–49.
with Angela C. Jenks, and Scott Stonington. ‘Clinical Subjectivation. Anthropologies of Contemporary Biomedical Training’. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 35, no. 2 (2011): 105–12.
with Maya Ponte. ‘En-case-ing the Patient. Disciplining Uncertainty in Medical Student Patient Presentations’. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 35, no. 2 (2011): 163–82.
‘Parce qu’ils sont plus près du sol. L’invisibilisation de la souffrance sociale des cueilleurs de baies’. Act es de la recherche en sciences sociales 165, no. 4 (2006): 28–51.
with Scott Stonington, eds. Social Medicine in the Twenty-First Century [= PLoS Medicine, 3 (10)], 2006.
Last updated: February 29, 2016
Professor Jonathan Hyslop
Colgate University, Hamilton, USA / University of Pretoria, South Africa
An African Port and the Life‐Cycles of a Transnational Workforce. Durban and the Seafarers of the British Merchant Navy c.1885‐1945
Jonathan Hyslop is Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, and the Africana and Latin American Studies Program, at Colgate University, Hamilton, New York. He grew up in Johannesburg, South Africa and studied at the universities of Oxford, Birmingham and the Witwatersrand. He has spent most of his career at the University of Witwatersrand, where he was Professor of Sociology and History, and Deputy Director of the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER). Hyslop was for many years a member of the Johannesburg History Workshop. He has published widely on the social history of nineteenth and twentieth Century southern Africa. His books include The Notorious Syndicalist: J.T. Bain - a Scottish Rebel in Colonial South Africa (Johannesburg, Jacana, 2004). Hyslop is member of the editorial board of the Journal of African History.
Jonathan Hyslop's research project at re:work is entitled:"An African Port and the Life-Cycles of a Transnational Workforce: Durban and the Seafarers of the British Merchant Navy c.1885-1945".The study traces patterns of the life cycle of maritime workers in the British Merchant Navy, through the lens of the South African port of Durban. Using a combination of South African and international archival sources, and internet sources which allow the gathering of data on international seafarers, the project seeks to compile and anlayse multiple micro-biographies of sailors who passed through Durban in those years. The study asks to what extent the seafarers of the modern world constituted a particularly ‘transnational’ workforce, and investigates the way in which this may be important for the ways in which we understand the development of global socio-economic connections, colonialism and the nature of work. The study asks to what extent there were commonalities and divergences in life and work experience amongst the seamen of different nationalities; what kinds of unities and divisions there were amongst them; and to what extent race and ethnicity were significant in the political identities of seamen.
Hyslop is currently Professor of Sociology and African Studies at Colgate University and Extraordinary Professor, University of Pretoria.
Publications
‘Southampton to Durban on the Union Castle Line. An Imperial Shipping Company and the Limits of Globality c. 1900–39’. The Journal of Transport History, 2017.
‘E.P. Thompson in South Africa. The Practice and Politics of Social History in an Era of Revolt and Transition, 1976 2012’. International Review of Social History 61, no. 1 (2016): 95–116.
with Philip Bonner, and Lucien van der Walt. ‘Rethinking Worlds of Labour’. In Global Histories of Work, edited by Andreas Eckert, 90–122. Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2016.
‘A British Strike in an African Port. The Mercantile Marine and Dominion Politics in Durban, 1925’. The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 43, no. 5 (2015): 882–902.
‘“Ghostlike” Seafarers and Sailing Ship Nostalgia. The Figure of the Steamship Lascar in the British Imagination, C. 1880–1960’. Journal for Maritime Research 16, no. 2 (2014): 212–28.
‘The Strange Death of Liberal England and the Strange Birth of Illiberal South Africa. British Trade Unionists, Indian Labourers and Afrikaner Rebels, 1910-1914’. Labour History Review 79, no. 1 (2014): 97–120.
‘Zulu Sailors in the Steamship Era. The African Modern in the World Voyage Narratives of Fulunge Mpofu and George Magodini, 1916–24’. In Critical Perspectives on Colonialism. Writing the Empire from Below, edited by Fiona Paisley and Kirsty Reid, 123–40. New York, NY: Routledge, 2014.
‘“Segregation Has Fallen on Evil Days”. Smuts’ South Africa, Global War, and Transnational Politics, 1939–46’. Journal of Global History 7, no. 3 (2012): 438–60.
with Philip Bonner, and Lucien van der Walt, eds. Transnational and Comparative Perspectives on Southern African Labour History [= Special Issue African Studies, 66 (2-3)]. Routledge, 2007.
The Notorious Syndicalist. J.T. Bain, a Scottish Rebel in Colonial South Africa. Johannesburg: Jacana, 2004.
The Classroom Struggle. Policy and Resistance in South Africa, 1940-1990. Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 1999.
Dr. Dina Makram-Ebeid
American University Cairo, EGY
Precarious Revolution. Work in the Shadow of the Egyptian Rebellion
Dina Makram-Ebeid is an anthropologist and a research associate at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle (Saale), Germany. She received her PhD in social anthropology (2013) from the London School of Economics, United Kingdom and joined the Max Planck Institute as a post-doctoral research fellow to work on a project on industry and inequality in Eurasia. She taught anthropology and development studies at the American University in Cairo and the London School of Economics.
Makram-Ebeid’s research agenda includes economic and political anthropology, the anthropology of work and labour, social movements, property relations, debt and development, and gender and mental health; she also has a broad interest in the anthropology of the Middle East. Her doctoral and post-doctoral research investigated the experience of labour and class inequalities in a steel plant in the years leading up to the Egyptian uprisings of 2011 and the two years that followed. Her work looked at innovations in property relations and their implication for class politics and popular mobilisation. It focused on tenured work contracts that can be bequeathed to workers’ children in public factories. This form of contract developed into a kind of property that crossed the boundaries of common understandings of “private property” and the “public sector”. Makram-Ebeid’s research has been supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Arab Council for Social Sciences, the Alfred Gell Memorial Fund, and the Population Council West Asia and North Africa.
While at re:work, Makram-Ebeid will prepare a manuscript on the centrality of property and class relations to the Egyptian uprisings of 2011; both aspects, property and class, have been overlooked in the historiography of the uprisings. The project is based on three years of ethnographic fieldwork on a factory shop-floor, in workers’ homes, and public rallies in Egypt’s oldest and largest steel producing town in the south of Cairo. Factories of the kind where the research was conducted played a pivotal role in the early years of national and post-colonial state-making up to the organising that culminated in Mubarak’s ousting. They thus offer an important perspective on the mutations in Egyptian political economy during the period between the Free Officers’ coup of 1952 and Mubarak’s ousting in 2011. The project elucidates how, in the years leading up to 2011, the ability of the majority of blue collar steel workers to bequeath their tenured job positions to their children led them to increasingly see themselves as part of the middle class. Workers’ aspirations for job and marital stability were thus turned by various state actors into a claim for the stability of the state and the successive regimes since Mubarak. The project explores how these struggles for intergenerational “stability” in the context of the wider precarity and dispossession in this steel producing town became a catalyst for the 2011 uprisings.
Publications
‘Between God and the State. Class, Precarity, and Cosmology on the Margins of an Egyptian Steel Town’. In Industrial Labor on the Margins of Capitalism. Precarity, Class, and the Neoliberal Subject, edited by Chris Hann and Jonathan Parry, 180–96. New York, NY: Berghahn, 2018.
‘Labour Struggles and the Quest for Permanent Employment in Revolutionary Egypt’. In The Political Economy of the New Egyptian Republic, edited by Nicholas S Hopkins, 65–84. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2015.
‘“Old People Are Not Revolutionaries!” Labor Struggles Between Precarity and Istiqrar in a Factory Occupation in Egypt’. Jadaliyya - جدلية, 25 January 2015.
‘Manufacturing Stability. Everyday Politics of Work in an Industrial Steel Town in Helwan, Egypt’. PhD, The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), 2012.
Last updated: April 13, 2018
Professor João José Reis
Universidade Federal da Bahia, Salvador da Bahia, Brazil
Ganhadores. Street Labour in Nineteenth‐century Bahia
holds a PhD from the University of Minnesota (1982). He is professor of history at the Federal University of Bahia in Salvador, Brazil, and has been a visiting professor at the universities of Michigan (Ann Arbor), Princeton, Brandeis, Texas (Austin), and Harvard. He is an honorary foreign member of the American Historical Association, and has received other awards and honours, such as the Order of Scientific Merit from the Brazilian Ministry of Sciences, the National Book Award from the Brazilian publishers’ association, and the Cuban Casa de las Américas book award. Reis’ research interests include nineteenth-century social movements and slavery in Brazil. Among other work in progress, he is writing about slave resistance, African religion, and the biographies of African slaves and freed people.
His project at re:work, titled “Ganhadores: street labor in nineteenth-century Bahia”, is a history of the battle that took place between Africans and the state between 1835, the year of the famous Muslim revolt in Bahia, and 1888, the year slavery was abolished in Brazil. It investigates state control and African resistance, and includes a discussion of how resistance was culturally organized. The main focus is the one-week strike that occurred in 1857 against a municipal ordinance that sought to increase the political control of African street workers through taxation and registration.
Publications
Divining Slavery and Freedom. The Story of Domingos Sodré, an African Priest in Nineteenth-Century Brazil. Translated by H. Sabrina Gledhill. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
with Elciene Azevedo, eds. Escravidão e suas sombras. Salvador: Edufba, 2012.
with Herbert S. Klein. ‘Slavery in Brazil’. In The Oxford Handbook of Latin American History, edited by Jose C. Moya, 181–211. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
with Laura de Mello e Souza. ‘Popular Movements in Colonial Brazil’. In The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World, 1450-1850, edited by Nicholas Canny and Philip Morgan, 550–66. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
‘Candomblé and Slave Resistance in Nineteenth-Century Bahia’. In Sorcery in the Black Atlantic, edited by Luis Nicolau Parés and Roger Sansi, 55–74. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2011.
‘Batuque. African Drumming and Dance between Repression and Concession, Bahia, 1808-1855’. Bulletin of Latin American Research 24, no. 2 (2005): 201–14.
Death Is a Festival. Funeral Rites and Rebellion in Nineteenth-Century Brazil. Translated by H. Sabrina Gledhill. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.
Slave Rebellion in Brazil. The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia. Translated by Arthur Brakel. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.
Last updated: March 02, 2016
Professor Manja Stephan-Emmrich
Humboldt University Berlin, Germany
Dubai as ‘Ideal’ and ‘Worst Place’: Education, Work and Piety in the Translocal Livelihoods of Mobile Tajiks
manja.stephan-emmrich(at)hu-berlin.de
gained her doctorate in social anthropology from the University of Halle-Wittenberg in 2009. As part of her doctoral research, she joined the research project “Islamic Education in the Soviet Union and its Successor States” (funded by Volkswagenstiftung) at the Ruhr-University of Bochum, the research group “Civil Religion” at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology and the Graduate School “Society and Culture in Motion” at Halle/Saale between 2002 and 2006.
Since May 2010, Stephan-Emmrich has been junior professor for Islam in Asian and African societies at the Humboldt University’s Institute of Asian and African Studies. She is also a principal investigator at the Berlin Graduate School “Muslim Cultures and Societies” (BGSMCS). At present, she leads the research project “Translocal Goods – Education, Work, and Commodities between Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, China, and the Arab Emirates”, which is funded by Volkswagenstiftung.
Her areas of expertise include the anthropology of Islam, mobility/migration and religion, transregional Muslim networks, urban religions, education and youth.
Stephan-Emmrich’s research links Islamic reformism with the mobile subjectivity and geographies of home. In her current book project she explores how young Tajiks who have left their homes to study Islam in Middle Eastern countries merge their educational aspirations, work strategies and spiritual demands into translocal livelihoods that link places in the Arab Emirates and the wider Arab region with their Central Asian homes. Situating the students’ livelihoods at the juncture of the global economy, transnational Muslim politics and various local/national regimes, the project investigates how studying and working in Dubai forms a horizon of experience in which mobile Tajiks develop their pious ideals, personal reform projects and the labour to realize them.
Her research at re:work explores how the Tajik students’ mobile biographies transgress the boundaries between work and education; thereby also looking at how the success and limits of mobile education, work and piety projects are related to age/generation and life course. In addition, her anthropological interest is devoted to the junctures of religion and work, as these issues manifest in strategies of professionalization through piety, educational capital and border-crossing Muslim networks and in the changing moral assessment of Dubai as either the ideal or the worst place to do ‘proper’ work or feel at ‘home’.
Publications
‘Studying Islam Abroad. Pious Enterprises and Educational Aspirations of Young Tajik Muslims’. In Islam, Society, and Politics in Central Asia, edited by Pauline Jones Luong, forthcoming.
with Abdullah Mirzoev. ‘The Manufacturing of Islamic Lifestyles in Tajikistan Through the Prism of Dushanbe’s Bazaars’. Central Asian Survey 35, no. 2 (2016): 157–77.
with Philipp Schröder. ‘The Institutionalization of Mobility. Well-Being and Social Hierarchies in Central Asian Translocal Livelihoods’. Mobilities, 2014, 24 pp.
with Christine Hunner-Kreisel, eds. Neue Räume, neue Zeiten. Kindheit und Familie im Kontext von (Trans-) Migration und sozialem Wandel. Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2013.
‘Duschanbe – Moskau – Kairo. Transnationale religiöse Erziehungspraktiken tadschikischer Familien in der Migration’. In Neue Räume, neue Zeiten. Kindheit und Familie im Kontext von (Trans-) Migration und sozialem Wandel, edited by Christine Hunner-Kreisel and Manja Stephan, 125–40. Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2013.
‘Schulischer Ethikunterricht in Tadschikistan. Moralerziehung zwischen säkularstaatlichen Interessen und gesellschaftlichen Realitäten’. In Repression, Anpassung, Neuorientierung. Studien zum Islam in der Sowjetunion und dem postsowjetischen Raum, edited by Raoul Motika, Michael Kemper, and Anke von Kügelgen, 253–88. Wiesbaden: Reichert Verlag, 2013.
‘Education, Youth and Islam. The Growing Popularity of Private Religious Lessons in Dushanbe, Tajikistan’. In Youth in the Former Soviet South. Everyday Lives Between Experimentation and Regulation, edited by Stefan Bastian Kirmse, 89–103. London: Routledge, 2012.
Das Bedürfnis nach Ausgewogenheit. Moralerziehung, Islam und Muslimsein in Tadschikistan zwischen Säkularisierung und religiöser Rückbesinnung. Würzburg: Ergon, 2010.
Last updated: June 06, 2016
Dr. Christian Strümpell
Universität Hamburg, DE
'Work' and 'Life', and the Reproduction of Inequality in a Postcolonial Company Town. The Case of Rourkela, India
christian.struempell@uni-hamburg.de
Christian Strümpell is a research associate at the Department of Anthropology at Heidelberg University’s South Asia Institute. He gained his doctorate in social anthropology from Freie Universität, Berlin in 2004 before working as a research fellow at the university’s Institute of Anthropology. Between 2007 and 2009, he also held positions at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle (Saale). Strümpell’s research interests are centred on the socio-cultural and politico-economic transformations triggered by industrialisation. He has explored this field for 15 years including during long-term ethnographic studies in East India, and a shorter six-month research project in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh.
Strümpell’s doctoral research analysed the relationship between caste and local understandings of industrial modernity with a focus on a public sector hydropower station in the Indian state of Odisha. His subsequent work investigated the social changes related to an integrated steel plant in Odisha built by the Indian government shortly after independence in the 1950s with the help of West German companies, among others. Primarily, the Odisha steel plant aimed at economically securing the political independence of the young Indian republic through the production of a key material: steel. In addition, joint work in this modern public-sector steelworks, as well as the shared social aspects that were associated with life in a connected, modern factory city provided a secular identity that transcended the diverse, ‘primordial’ identities of caste, region and religion. The aim was to form a socialist industrial workforce (in Neru’s sense) that was to serve as a role model for the entire country. To date, Strümpell’s publications have particularly examined the ways in which local interplays between class, caste, ethnicity and gender are embedded within regional, national and global contexts. This has included studying the social structures and political landscape of the Odisha region, as well as Indian economic liberalization, which has been on-going since the 1990’s at least in part due to international pressure.
At re:work, Strümpell is continuing his work on Rourkela by investigating the reproduction of inequalities in the interactions between work and the urban, neighbourly aspects of life. This involves an analysis that moves beyond the generations and that also includes an investigation of the influence of West German companies’ culture, and their ideas of employer-employee relations and work and leisure.
Publications
with Patrick Neveling, and Daniel Münster, eds. The Making of Neoliberal India [= Special Issue Contributions to Indian Sociology, 48 (1)]. SAGE journals, 2014.
‘The Politics of Dispossession in an Odishan Steel Town’. Contributions to Indian Sociology 48, no. 1 (2014): 45–72.
with Andrew Sanchez. ‘Anthropological and Historical Perspectives on India’s Working Classes’. Modern Asian Studies 48, no. 5 (2014): 1233–41. doi:10.1017/S0026749X14000018.
‘Law Against Displacement. The Juridification of Tribal Protest in Rourkela, India’. In Law Against the State. Ethnographic Forays into Law’s Transformations, edited by Julia Eckert, Brian Donahoe, Christian Stümpell, and Zerrin Özlem Biner, 202–27. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
‘Social Citizenship and Ethnicity Around a Public Sector Steel Plant in Orissa, India’. Citizenship Studies 15, no. 3–4 (2011): 485–98.
‘“We Work Together, We Eat Together”. Conviviality and Modernity in a Company Settlement in South Orissa’. Contributions to Indian Sociology 42, no. 3 (2008): 351–81.
with Jonathan Parry. ‘On the Desecration of Nehru´s Temples. Bhilai and Rourkela Compared’. Economic and Political Weekly 43, no. 19 (2008): 47–57.
‚Wir arbeiten zusammen, wir essen zusammen’. Konvivium und soziale Peripherie in einer indischen Werkssiedlung. Münster: LIT Verlag, 2006.
Last updated: March 03, 2016
Professor Thaddeus Sunseri
Colorado State University, Fort Collins, USA
Working in the Global Slaughterhouse. Tanganyika Packers in Dar es Salaam
thaddeus.sunseri(at)colostate.edu
Thaddeus Sunseri is Professor of History at Colorado State University, where he specializes in East African history, particularly colonial and post-colonial Tanzania. He formerly taught at Chicago State University and as a Fulbright scholar at the University of Zimbabwe. Past research included a history of African labor migration to cotton plantations under German colonial rule, reinterpretations of the Maji Maji war, and the repercussions of scientific forestry in Tanzania. His current project examines intersections of labor, environment, and human and animal disease in a transnational context. Most recently he has researched the history of Rinderpest (cattle plague) in East Africa and its wider Eurasian and African context from the late nineteenth century to its global eradication in 2010. This project investigates colonial and postcolonial state efforts to commercialize, modernize, and internationalize the cattle economies of East Africa by combating animal disease, and how Africans have engaged such efforts.
At re:work he studies the history of labor at Tanganyika Packers Ltd., Tanzania's first commercial meat packing plant in Dar es Salaam until its demise in the 1990s. TPL was an extension of the global beef canning enterprise known as Lemco, which had its origins in 1860s Uruguay, but went on to develop branches in regions of Africa where cattle were vulnerable to drought, including Tanzania's drylands. During the 1950s TPL was Tanzania's major urban employer, and its workers were actively involved in unionization that also intersected with the nationalist movement. The modern history of the corporation parallels the transition from late colonial rule to early socialism in independent Tanzania, until the neo-liberal turn that also led to the closing of the factory. TPL's history broadly reflects transformations in the global beef sector that has adversely affected the working lives of meatpackers.
Publications
‘Working in the Slaughterhouse. Tanganyika Packers Ltd., from Colonialism to Collapse, 1947-2014’. Labor History, forthcoming.
‘International Collaboration and Rivalry in the Early Fight Against Rinderpest’. EuropeNow. A Journal of Research & Art, no. 15 (2018).
‘Blood Trials. Transfusions, Injections, and Experiments in Africa, 1890–1920’. Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, forthcoming, 29 pp.
‘The Entangled History of Sadoka (Rinderpest) and Veterinary Science in Tanzania and the Wider World, 1891–1901’. Bulletin of the History of Medicine 89, no. 1 (2015): 92–121.
‘Exploiting the Urwald. German Post-Colonial Forestry in Poland and Central Africa, 1900-1960’. Past & Present 214 (2012): 305–42.
‘A Political Ecology of Beef in Colonial Tanzania and the Global Periphery, 1864–1961’. Journal of Historical Geography 39, no. 1 (2013): 29–42.
Wielding the Ax. State Forestry and Social Conflict in Tanzania, 1820-2000. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2009.
‘“Every African a Nationalist”. Scientific Forestry and Forest Nationalism in Colonial Tanzania’. Comparative Studies in Society and History 49, no. 4 (2007): 883–913.
‘The Political Ecology of the Copal Trade in the Tanzanian Coastal Hinterland, C. 1820–1905’. The Journal of African History 48, no. 2 (2007): 201–20.
Vilimani. Labor Migration and Rural Change in Early Colonial Tanzania. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2002.
Professor Yoko Tanaka
筑波大学 (University of Tsukuba), Japan
The Historical Development of Part-Time Work. A Comparative Study
is professor in socio-economic and labour history at the Institute for Social Sciences at the University of Tsukuba, Japan. She initially worked for the Faculty of Economics at the University of Tokyo, where she graduated and received her PhD in 1992 with a historical study of the German company Krupp Co. focused on the period prior to 1914. She moved to the University of Tsukuba in 1991, where she received various DAAD and JSPS grants and spent time at the University of Munich, the FU Berlin, and the WZB with Professor Jürgen Kocka several times. Between 2003 and 2004, she took part in a research project led by the WZB on the transnational comparison of the European social model.
Her research mainly focuses on the relations between corporation and work or working people, and their historical transition from a long-term perspective. Her main research on Krupp’s labour history was awarded a prize by the Japan Association for Social Policy Studies (JASPS), and the Okinaga Prize for the best publication on labour relations in 2001/2002. She later enhanced her research by including the post-war period and current changes, as well as German/Japanese comparisons.
As manager of several projects, she has implemented many oral interviews with German and Japanese corporations and employees’ organizations, along with archival historical research on working time, payment structures, career formation, work–life balance, and the functions of workers’ organizations. Since 2006, she has committed herself to the continuous symposiums on German–Japanese family policy, supported by the German–Japanese Center Berlin and the University of Tsukuba.
She has been on the board of directors of the JASPS for more than ten years, and has been the society’s conference programme director for four years. Between 2012 and 2014 she was the society’s president. From 2008 to 2009, she was chief editor of German studies at the Society for German Studies in Japan, and was a member of its board. Between 2012 and 2014, she was chief editor of international Japanese studies at the University of Tsukuba.
Her research project at re:work deals with the historical development and present circumstances of part-time work from a comparative point of view, and is focused on Germany and Japan. Her project takes into account the structural changes of post-war society and treats them as the cause of increased part-time work in the 21st century. These changes include moves from male to female employees, from industry to the service sector, from skilled to unskilled labour, and from fixed to flexible systems of work. Based on statistics, historical documents, and interview data, her research analyses the comparative paths of both countries, including the major similarities on the one hand, and the contrasting development of part-time work on the other.
Publications
‘The Social Regulation of Labor in Germany. The “Job-Miracle” and Dual Codetermination System’. Social Policy 6, no. 4 (2015).
‘Re-Arranging Economy and Care’. In What Is Care?, edited by Yoshinori Hiroi, 125–49. Kyoto: Minerva, 2013.
‘Development of Time-Policy in Germany’. The Japanese Journal of Labour Studies, no. 619 (2012).
‘Change of Work and Social Stratification’. German Studies 44 (2010): 18–37.
‘Between Self-Responsibility and Social Security. Japan and the European Social Model from a Historical Perspective’. In Das europäische Sozialmodell. Auf dem Weg zum transnationalen Sozialstaat t, edited by Hartmut Kaelble and Günther Schmid, 167–214. Berlin: Edition Sigma, 2004.
Formation and Transformation of the German Big Corporation. Career, Security and Governance in the Fried. Krupp Co. before World War I. Kyoto: Minerva, 2001.
Last updated: March 04, 2016